This is a bug-fixing release, partly remedying to the too-abrupt removal on our part of some long-obsoleted macros which were however still used "in the wild": AM_CONFIG_HEADER and (to a much lesser degree) AM_PROG_CC_STDC. Now the use of these obsolete macros elicit clear and helpful error messages, rather than obscure failures that give no hint about what the real cause of the failure is.

Elisp byte-compilation recipes have been overhauled, for better support of VPATH and subdir builds, and improved concurrency.

The parallel testsuite harness (previously only enabled by the 'parallel-tests' option) is now the default.

The user can now define his own recursive targets, with the help of the new 'AM_EXTRA_RECURSIVE_TARGETS' m4 macro.

Semantics of the 'missing' script have been radically altered: it no longer tries to update the timestamp of out-of-date files that require a maintainer-specific tool to be remade, but just gives clearer and useful warnings than a "program not found" diagnostic.

Macros AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR and AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS can now be used to declare the local m4 include directories. Accordingly, the special make variable ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS will become deprecated in future releases, and you should start moving away from it ASAP.

Starting with it, the warnings in the 'obsolete' category are enabled by default; this way, it will be harder for projects that don't use the '-Wall' option to be suddenly bitten by backward-incompatible changes, without having been properly warned in advance.

In addition, this release addresses few minor testsuite weaknesses that caused reduced coverage or spurious errors.

GNU Automake 1.12.2 has been released. This is a maintenance
release, which, among the other changes, fixes a security issue relevant for packages using Automake (CVE-2012-3386). See the announcements for details.

This is mostly a bug-fixing release, addressing minor bugs, several weaknesses in Automake's own testsuite and build system, and some inefficiencies in the implementation of the 'check' and 'recheck' targets (as offered by the parallel test harness).

This release also introduces new deprecation warnings about backward incompatibilities planned for the next major release (1.13), and adds support for the Objective C++ language (thanks to Peter Breitenlohner).

This is a major release with several important changes, coming almost three years after the latest major release (1.11).

The most significant new feature in this release is certainly the support for the TAP testing protocol in the Automake-generated testsuite harnesses.

There is also at least one long-awaited bug fix: now, any explicit enabling or disabling of a warning category always take precedence over the set of warning categories implied by the strictness mode. For example, a setting like "AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = -Wall --foreign" will cause the warnings in category 'portability' to be enabled, even if those warnings are by default disabled in 'foreign' strictness. This wasn't the case for older Automake versions.

GNU Automake 1.11.3 has been released. It is a maintenance release, containing mostly bug fixes and deprecations of obsolete features. But it also introduces a couple new minor features of its own (support for lzip compression of distribution tarballs and for the new EXTRA_foo_DEPENDENCIES variables).